July '26

One further intricacy binds us to the Manufacture des Gobelins. Now and again the selfsame colour appears to be different. “The dyers deliver us a faded black, and so they ruin our monumental tapestries,” lamented generation upon generation of master weavers in the quarter that today bears their name. That riddle was solved only in the early nineteenth century by Michel-Eugène Chevreul, a chemist of genius, who proved that chemistry was blameless. The true culprit was biology.

The retina within your eye is no ordinary camera. Were it such, it would merely record, “blindly,” the wavelength and brightness of every point beheld. Yet that is not the question the organ of sight truly resolves. What matters is whether a given point marks the outline of a bear lurking behind a tree, or whether beyond it begins a precipice where our next step may prove our last. In other words: it is not colours alone that matter, but the company they keep.

Every colour you behold clothes all its neighbours in a tender garment, and they do likewise unto it. And since there is no colour without at least one neighbour, the world around us is not a collection of solitary shades, but a mutually intermingling weave of millions of colour arrangements.

Chevreul’s “law of the simultaneous contrast of colours” does not, then, confine us — on the contrary, it tells us that everything around is even more colourful than we had supposed.